North Adams without health care

We all knew something like this was on the way, but we had no idea the story would be this horrible. Most people I know realized that North Adams Regional Hospital would face some serious restructuring — most likely a buy-out that would close lots of services, but would at least keep some of the doctors offices and some kind of urgent care facility. We realized the economy just wouldn’t support the full-service system we had.

It is literally a speechless moment. The first response is some real questions about how this happened. To ask the question plainly, what were the hospital administrators thinking ? How could they screw this up this badly? There are a lot of questions that need serious answers, and I hope people are held accountable.

But there seems nothing else we can do but learn to live with a grim reality. It really hit me at dinner last night when I saw my daughter carelessly pick up a knife at the wrong end. “Be careful,” I warned. “Next week it will be a 40-minute drive before we can get you stitched up.” It’s one thing when you think about how much more annoying the routine minor emergencies that punctuate life have become. But then you realize it’s way more than that, and this is serious. Not to be melodramatic, but this is a decision that will lead to deaths that could be avoided.

On another level, this is a massive blow to a region and a community that has taken more than its share of lumps in the still-young year of 2014. In so many hard ways we’ve lost our identity. First the Transcript died its long-awaited, inevitable death, in which the end came faster than we may have liked. Now the hospital — which is also, by the way, the city’s largest employer — is gone.

There are many who see this is the kind of painful right-sizing our area was dur for. That our population is shrinking, our economy isn’t growing, and we’ve been living for decades beyond our means. Maybe, but this is still a stupendously rich country, and it’s disgraceful that so many of us have to live this way.